Even the apparently unreliable narrator is more often than not reliably unreliable. Rochester’s eyesight is gradually returning at the end of the novel). Rochester, she can now see her whole life story, rather as Mr. The first-person narrator is often highly reliable Jane Eyre, a highly reliable first-person narrator, for instance, tells us her story from a position of belated enlightenment (years later, married to Mr. But both sides of this division have been caricatured.Īctually, first-person narration is generally more reliable than unreliable and third-person “omniscient” narration is generally more partial than omniscient. But I think these certainties have been taken from us by the course of history, and that we do have to acknowledge our own sense of ignorance and of insufficiency in these matters and therefore to try and write accordingly.”2įor Sebald, and for many writers like him, standard third-person omniscient narration is a kind of antique cheat. Given that you have a world where the rules are clear and where one knows where trespassing begins, then I think it is legitimate, within that context, to be a narrator who knows what the rules are and who knows the answers to certain questions. I cannot bear to read books of this kind.” Sebald continued: “If you refer to Jane Austen, you refer to a world where there were set standards of propriety which were accepted by everyone.
Any form of authorial writing where the narrator sets himself up as stagehand and director and judge and executor in a text, I find somehow unacceptable. Sebald once said to me, “I think that fiction writing which does not acknowledge the uncertainty of the narrator himself is a form of imposture which I find very, very difficult to take. Authorial omniscience, people assume, has had its day, much as that “vast, moth-eaten musical brocade” called religion has also had its. On one side, Tolstoy, say and on the other, Humbert Humbert or Italo Svevo’s narrator, Zeno Cosini, or Bertie Wooster.
The common idea is that there is a contrast between reliable narration (third-person omniscience) and unreliable narration (the unreliable first-person narrator, who knows less about himself than the reader eventually does). In reality, we are stuck with third- and first-person narration. Anything else probably will not much resemble narration it may be closer to poetry, or prose-poetry. I can tell a story in the third person or in the first person, and perhaps in the second person singular, or in the first person plural, though successful examples of these latter two are rare,1 indeed. The house of fiction has many windows, but only two or three doors.
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